In response to this article, Trident were nice enough to send us a laptop for testing. The laptop they sent was the Toshiba Tecra M1 with a 1.6gig Pentium 4m and 512mb - the same model Bill Smith was using in the original article.

The laptop came pre-installed but I decided to do a clean install of Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 and DirectX 9. I then did several tests with the original "bugged" drivers and the new "fixed" drivers.

I first used 3dMark 2001 SE (Build 330). To try and get an image quality comparison I took a screen grab at 6:83 seconds. I took these using the original exe name and then a renamed one. I tried to get the times as close as possible, but it is very hard to do! I managed to get 6:83,6:83 and 6:87. Please bear in mind that 3dmark has an error margin of around 100 points. If you would like the original uncompressed screen grabs then download this 2.25mb zip file.

	This is using the "bugged" drivers and the renamed EXE. This shows the highest quality overall and scored 2944 3d marks. This is taken at 6:83 seconds.
	This is the "bugged" drivers with the original exe name. As you can see there is major image quality loss. You can hardly make out the text on the back of the truck. This scored 5757 3d marks. This was taken at 6:87 seconds which is a small margin ahead of the other two but looking at grabs from 6:75 as well, the image quality is still poor so the time difference is negligable.
	This is taken using their "fixed" drivers and the quality is still not as good as the renamed exe on the "bugged" drivers. It's almost a middle point, not at either extreme. And it scores 5402. This was taken at 6:83 seconds so can be exactly compared to the top picture.

I think from these pictures it is pretty obvious that there is still application detection and "optimization" going on but they have taken a step back and chosen a middle point where image quality is "ok" but still not perfect - hence the slight drop in performance.

I had a poke around in the "bugged" drivers using just a hex editor and came across references to particular exe files such as GTA3, FS2002, Spiderman, Aqua and of course 3dMark. In the "fixed" driver however there is no longer a reference to 3dMark's exe file. So they are obviously detecting 3dMark in a much better manner now, or covering it up better - whichever way you want to look at it.

But, in the new drivers there were STILL references to the GTA3 exe file and many other games, so I took to investiagate this...

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